Chapter 9 - The Eviction of the King
The moving van was not white. It was a battered, twenty-six-foot Penske truck with a yellow cab and rusted roll-up doors that groaned like an iron gate whenever the hydraulic lift engaged.
It was three-thirty in the afternoon. The sleet had stopped, but the sky had settled into that deep, bruising violet that comes before a heavy Pennsylvania snowfall. The blacktop of Coventry Mill Road was lined with six marked cruisers from the Chester County Sheriff’s Department and two unmarked sedans belonging to the state police financial crimes division.
The front lawn of number 402 looked like an unorganized municipal swap meet.
Cardboard boxes—hastily packed by two bonded commercial movers under the supervision of Deputy Miller—sat in crooked stacks on the wet slush of the driveway: boxes of Harper’s equestrian trophies, boxes of Beatrice’s commemorative porcelain plates from the Franklin Mint, and twelve plastic tubs containing my father’s thirty-year collection of hunting magazines and unopened golf equipment.
My mother sat in the front passenger seat of Harper’s Audi, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her face pressed against the tinted glass like an old woman in a nursing home looking out at a cemetery. She had not come into the house. She had refused to speak to the movers. She had spent two hours screaming into her smartphone at her brother Raymond, who had finally told her that he was an excavation subcontractor, not a homeless shelter, and that his spare bedroom had already been rented to his wife’s nephew.
Harper stood near the edge of the road, her camel-hair coat stained with brown slush around the hem where a passing salt truck had sprayed the curb. Her smartphone was dead; the battery had given out two hours earlier after she had posted forty-seven frantic, increasingly incoherent updates about "corrupt county magistrates" and "elder abuse conspiracies."
My father stood on the bluestone front porch.
He was wearing his Carhartt bibs over a gray thermal shirt, his heavy work boots caked with the red mud from the garden beds where he had tried, thirty minutes earlier, to dig up his commercial backup generator before Deputy Miller informed him that a generator bolted to a concrete pad was a permanent fixture under Section 14 of the real property code.
"You can't take the tools, Clara," Gregory said as I walked up the three bluestone steps.
His voice didn't have the roar anymore. The booming, boardroom authority had leaked out of him through the holes in his legal standing, leaving behind the dry, whistling rasp of an old man whose joints were full of gravel. He looked smaller. The heavy, broad-shouldered mass that had terrified me for twenty years seemed to have collapsed inward, his spine curving forward beneath the faded canvas of his vest.
"The tools belong to the shop, Gregory," I said, stopping on the top landing.
I was wearing my dark wool coat, my hands resting easily in my pockets, the cold winter wind brushing the scar beneath my left eye.
"The shop was my business," he muttered, his eyes refusing to meet mine, tracking the toe of his boot as it scraped against the masonry. "I built those bays. I bought that Delta table saw with my own money from the township library job in ninety-six."
"You bought that saw with a check drawn on Grandpa’s commercial account while he was in the surgical ward having his prostate removed," I told him, my voice completely level, completely devoid of heat. "Elena found the canceled voucher in the bank archives on Tuesday. You signed his name with a blue ballpoint pen and misspelled his middle name."
Gregory’s jaw twitched. A faint, pathetic tremor ran through his lower lip.
"Where are we supposed to go, Clara?" he whispered. "Your mother has her heart condition. She can't stay in a motel on Route 100. It isn't right. It isn't Christian. You’re our daughter."
"I was your daughter when I was seven years old and had the croup, Gregory," I said, each word falling like an iron wedge into frozen timber. "And you locked me in the back of your pickup truck for three hours because my coughing was bothering your poker buddies in the kitchen. I was your daughter when I was fourteen, and you gave my college fund to Harper so she could have a sweet-sixteen party at the country club. And I was your daughter four weeks ago, when you smashed an oak chair across my face because I wouldn't let your golden child turn my son into her unpaid servant."
I stepped past him, took the new brass key from my coat pocket, and inserted it into the deadbolt he had installed the night he threw me out.
The lock turned with a smooth, oiled glide.
May you like
I pushed the heavy oak door open. The foyer smelled of damp pine, old copper, and the clean, cold emptiness of a house that had finally been purged of its ghosts.
"Your fifteen minutes are up, Gregory," I said, without looking back over my shoulder. "Take your wife. Take your daughter. And get off my blacktop."
